Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they've been taught is wrong! - Émile Zola

Oh, those bourgeois scum! One day they’d stuff 'em with champagne and truffles till their guts burst!

When Hélène came back, ... she said to herself that they had never loved one another less than that day.

The whole of Paris was lit up. The tiny dancing flames had bespangled the sea of darkness from end to end of the horizon, and now, like millions of stars, they burned with a steady light in the serene summer night. There was no breath of wind to make them flicker as they hung there in space. They made the unseen city seem as vast as a firmament, reaching out into infinity.